CHAPTER XXIV

THE TENTS OF GREENACRES

If it had not been for the opening of Hope College
the week after New Years, Miss Daphne declared, for
her part, she would not have gone back to Delphi until
she had at least seen the arbutus bloom again in April.
After Christmas at Greenacres, Cousin Roxy insisted
on both her and the Dean visiting at Elmhurst, but
before they left, the Dean had unfolded his plan.

“Daphne is well provided for in case of my passing
over,” he said, genially and unexpectedly, the
last evening he was with them, “and I have been
thinking a good deal lately over what Kit has well
named the folly of ‘dead men’s shoes.’”
He turned to where Mr. Robbins sat on the opposite
side of the round library table, nearest the fire.
“So I’ve taken the liberty, Jerry, of
making over to you now what you would have had inevitably
some day. Don’t say anything, please.
It’s a personal indulgence on my part.
I want to see, while I am alive, just exactly how
much happiness it will bring you and yours. It
is all well invested, but you may do as you like with
it. I would suggest that you would live on the
income, and stop worrying.”

And when both Mr. Robbins and the Mother Bird tried
to expostulate, the Dean only laughed at them, brushing
their arguments aside.

“Why, if I were to turn over everything I own
to the clan of Robbins, I could hardly pay back all
that Kit has done for me. I’m a new man,
Jerry. Sometimes I feel like a prehistoric toad
just released from a clay-bank and blinking in the
sunlight. Not only has she taught me the joy of
living, but through her ingenuity she brought about
one of the greatest discoveries that has been made
in years on ancient Egypt. I feel guilty in taking
any credit for it whatsoever, for while I was groping
blindly after the solution, she put her finger, as
it were, on the whole source of the trouble.”

After they had returned west, and Jean had gone back
to New York, Kit found her opportunity of laying her
summer plan before her mother and father.

“There are acres and acres here that we never
use at all. All that wonderful land on both sides
of the river up through the valley, and the two islands
besides. What I thought we could do was this,
if you could just let us girls manage it. Couldn’t
we start a regular tent colony? Jean was telling
me before she left about an artists’ colony up
in the Catskills, where they have tents fitted up
for light housekeeping, and I’m sure we could
do it here.”